Pretoria - The use of ratios by the South African Police Services (SAPS) when it released the national crime statistics was not intended to deliberately confuse matters or hide anything.
SAPS spokesperson Lieutenant General Solomon Makgale said SAPS uses ratios as it is a common international practice when doing comparisons.
“When using ratios, it is possible to find that although a certain crime category may have decreased, it may show increase when considering the raw figures. There is nothing untoward.”
Makgale said since crime was a social phenomenon, they had to take “a long time view as well as factor a key variable of the country's population in order to improve analysis”.
If one did not factor population change, Makgale said, it would result in an incorrect analysis and improper understanding of crime statistics.
“Normally, one would expect that as the population grows, so should crime due to the increased opportunities, particularly contact crime. However, longitudinally, this has not been the case with South Africa, at least in the past nine years.”
Last week, SAPS released stats which showed there was a slight increase of 0.6% in the murder rate in the past financial year.
Previously, this category had decreased by 27.2% over the past nine years, and 16.6% over the past four years.
There was also a 6.5% increase in attempted murder in the year under review.
Sexual offences were down by 0.4% over the past financial year of 2012/13. Rape, including compelled rape, acts of consensual sexual penetration with certain children (12>16 years), has decreased by 3.3% during the past four years.
Sexual assault decreased by 6.2% over the same period, after increasing during the preceding three years.
Releasing the National Crime Statistics on Thursday, 19 September, Police Minister Nathi Mthethwa said there were 896 298 serious crime arrests in 2012/13 compared to 777 140 during the 2011/12 reporting period.
Police convicted 352 513 people for serious crimes, while there were 307 580 convictions in 2011/12.
Contact crime has decreased by 38.2% over nine years, 16% during the past four years and 4.2% during the past financial year of 2012/13. – SAnews.gov.za
